Kevin Bacon is in the middle of a pitch-black streak of world-weary film roles, with no light romantic comedy at the end of the tunnel.

In his latest, "Death Sentence," based on the sequel to Brian Garfield's novel that spawned Charles Bronson's 1974 revenge classic, "Death Wish," Bacon starts out as solid citizen Nick Hume, content with his job as an insurance executive, his pretty wife (Kelly Preston), his happy kids and a nice house in the suburbs. Within 15 minutes, tragedy strikes, and by the third act, Nick has a shaved head and has become a shotgun-wielding vigilante, blowing away tattooed thugs.

LATEST SFGATE VIDEOS

"Career planning to me is an oxymoron," Bacon croaks in his theater-trained baritone. "But in the case of 'Death Sentence,' I literally called up my agent and said, 'Look, I want to kick some ass and do something physical.' A week later, I had the 'Death Sentence' script on my desk."

Besides the chance to wreak some onscreen mayhem, Bacon was attracted by the prospect of working with "Death Sentence" director James Wan, the Australian whiz kid born in Malaysia who created the low-budget horror-movie sensation "Saw" and its sequels.

When Bacon met the boyish, 30-year-old filmmaker in Los Angeles for the first time, he recalls, "my jaw dropped. He looked like a child. But I was struck with James' confidence and clarity in terms of shots and art direction and casting. He's also a great collaborator. I'm at a point in my career where I need to be part of the team, so I expect that kind of respect from the directors I work with."

Wan didn't hesitate to put Bacon through the wringer. He insisted on filming a precisely choreographed five-minute chase sequence in one uninterrupted shot that followed Bacon, dressed in a suit, sprinting through a three-story parking structure with skinheads in hot pursuit. It took 12 takes.

"My character was supposed to be completely exhausted and out of breath when we get to the top ramp and, believe me, by the end of the day, I was panting and ready to throw up on my shoes," says Bacon, 49. "It's what I call NAR - no acting required."

Wan admired Bacon's take on his character's de-evolution from well-behaved civilian to blood-soaked gunslinger.

"Kevin is in many ways an everyman," the director says, "but at the same time, it's like there's always some darker thing boiling underneath the surface."

In a single scene, Wan says, "Kevin goes from being sympathetic and very apologetic ... to then turning around and hardening right before the camera. You see that look on his face and you go, 'Wow, he's going to go after the rest of the bad guys now.' As a director, you can't ask for better than that."

It would have been hard to imagine Bacon taking on such a role in 1978, when the Philadelphian broke into movies fresh from New York's famed Circle in the Square Theatre School by playing the preppy frat brat Chip in "Animal House." Another iconic period piece, "Diner," followed in 1982. After starring in the splashy, music-driven "Footloose" (1984), Bacon fended off similar projects, opting instead to take supporting roles in big ensemble dramas such as "J.F.K." (1991) and "Apollo 13" (1995). Bacon's current spate of somber, character-driven pieces began in 2003 with "Mystic River." Bacon also produced and starred in "The Woodsman" (2004), earning critical plaudits for his performance as a shame-crippled pedophile, and the next year portrayed a bitter song-and-dance man with a murderous past in "Where the Truth Lies."

There's more misery to come: "Rails and Ties," set to open in December, casts Bacon as a train conductor burdened with the knowledge that he plowed into a suicidal mother parked on the tracks. And he's in the middle of shooting "Taking Chance," portraying a soldier assigned to guard the body of a GI killed in Iraq.

"That one is sort of overwhelming in its sadness," Bacon says. "Honestly, I feel like I need to kind of lighten it up a little bit. There have been a couple of comedies recently that I was really interested in doing, and they were like, 'Kevin Bacon? No, he's the intense guy. We can't go to him for this.' "

Bacon acknowledges that there's not much to draw from in his own life to inform the anguished characters he's been portraying onscreen. He lives most of the year in New York with his wife of nearly 19 years, Kyra Sedgwick, the twice Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning star of TNT's "The Closer," and their two teenagers.

"It's hard to analyze exactly what has taken me, and to a certain extent Kyra, too, into this kind of twisted, dark area," he says. "Our life is awfully sweet, but creatively, I've never looked for the easy road. That holds no value for me, and Kyra's the same way. When she finally decided to do a television series, she's in every scene, she has massive amounts of dialogue and she's playing an extreme character who's really nothing like her. I think we're kind of similar in that way."

There's also the matter of typecasting.

"When you do something intense like 'The Woodsman' (in which Sedgwick co-starred) or 'Mystic River,' Hollywood thinks of you as that sort of actor," Bacon says. "Therefore, that's what comes your way. At the same time, you made that bed, so you sort of have to lie in it. There is something about going to darker places with my work that I find somehow challenging or maybe therapeutic in some kind of a way."

In the case of "Death Sentence," Bacon says, his character learns a grim lesson in the pursuit of justice.

"There is a horrible price my character pays because he takes the law into his own hands," he says. "He can't wash that blood off his hands, and that comes back to haunt him."

DEATH SENTENCE (R) opens Friday at Bay Area Theaters.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.